Joanne Marie Conte’s surname means “tale” in French, and the story of her life more than fulfills the promise implicit in that word. Conte died Jan. 27 at age 79.

Born in 1933 in Rochester, N.Y., Conte spent her first four decades living as Joseph J. Baione. As Baione, Conte served as a military Morse code operator for the U.S. Army and Air Force during the Korean War.

In 1973, Conte underwent surgery to transition from male to female. By then, she had changed her name, including the name on her legal birth certificate — an extraordinary effort at a time when transgender people, born into bodies that betrayed the gender they identified as rightly their own, were generally vilified and regularly shunned.

Conte’s family disowned her after the surgery.

When Conte became socially and politically active in Arvada during the 1980s, she did not mention the first 40 years of her life.

“I first met Joanne in 1988, and at the time, she was a citizen advocate, and an active one,” said Ted Terranova, who served on the Arvada City Council with Conte.

“The whole thing started with an attempt by the council to allow a trash transfer station in the southeast part of Arvada,” he said. “It was near where she lived, not in her neighborhood, and it came up as a proposal from a local trash hauler who was popular with the City Council. But she helped organize, and because of her effort, she put a stop to it. She was always fighting for the little guy against big government.”

In 1991, Conte ran for City Council. Campaigning door-to-door, she won handily, to the dismay of many of her new fellow council members.

“At the time, the City Council had a problem with a bunker mentality: Don’t tell us what to do; we’re the professionals, and we’ll tell you what to do,” said Terranova, who initially was among Conte’s opponents. “She never bought into the bunker mentality, and that got her crosswise with the staff and council members. But she often came up with very good solutions.”

Among those was a proposal, supported by Terranova, to hire an ombudsman to resolve citizen disputes — objections to barking dogs, neighborhood parking kerfuffles and other minor problems. The council turned it down.

In late 1991 or early 1992, Conte’s adversaries surreptitiously passed the hat to collect funds to pay a private investigator to look into her background.

“Before I was Joanne’s ally, I was not her ally,” Terranova said. “I put in $100, and three or four others did, too. We thought maybe she was a criminal who’d relocated, or in witness protection. Her transfer from a man to a woman had nothing to do with her performance. Nonetheless, it created the scenario that ruined her political career.”

She lost the campaign to retain her seat on the council. She ran, as an Independent, for the state legislature in 1994. But Natalie Meyer, then secretary of state, disallowed Conte’s ballot access on the grounds that she had not declared her Independent affiliation according to policy. This prompted a lawsuit that went to the state Supreme Court, which voted 5-2 for Conte.

Conte briefly hosted a talk show on 850 KOA-AM but left, dismayed by the station’s promotional ads asking “Is it a man? Is it a woman?”

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